Acronis Migrate Easy 7.0

I recently lucked out and managed to copy a bunch of data off of a RAID drive that was giving me Delayed Write Failed messages as well as making some non standard noises like clicking scratching and so on. So i bought a 1 Terabyte hard drive and began the process of copying everything from my old computer to the new one.

It took about a day to copy all the data (around 400 gigs) over the network, once everything was copied off I made sure all folders matched in size with original. I also found it was better to copy in smaller chunks. The network is slower than having the hard drive located inside the computer I didn’t want to change another error, although I did have a few .

Once everything was done on my new PC my main boot hard drive started to clunk as well. It seems that hard drives don’t want to last any more than 3-4 years which is sad because I have some 60 gig IDE drives that are still working great.

I started looking into imaging windows so I wouldn’t not have to set everything up again, I had only just reinstalled windows a few months ago and I know the OS is nice and clean and un cluttered. I learned that Windows Vista now has a “Complete PC Restore” were it will make a VHD file and store it on another drive, naturally I stuck it on my new terabyte drive.

I stuck in the windows CD rebooted entered the BIOS changed the boot order to a empty drive that is in perfect working order (also newer) and then saved, rebooted once again. This time I enter the vista setup install vista once more and go into the recovery mode. I waited while it scanned the drives (instead of me telling it were to look, about 15 min) selected the drive to repair, selected the drive image to restore from. Hit next and what do you know. Windows cannot install an image on a new hard drive, it must be the same hard drive in which the image was made from. I was getting fed up at this point.

I did some research on Google and found that the image could be mounded as a virtual machine but that was more involved than I wanted to get. So I looked into cloning the hard drive and came across Acronis Migrate Easy 7.0 and thankfully they have a fully functional 15 day free trial. Installing it was painless using it in the advanced mode was simple.

Basically it modified the Master Boot Record to boot into its own application so it could lock down the partition, then analyze it, analyze the new drive, and the copied it all over. Total process took about 45 min to an hour. Rebooted once more change the boot order to reflect the newly imaged drive and I was pleased to see a login screen at a higher resolution, logged in and everything is as it should.

I’m sure the Vista Drive imaging application is great for restoring your OS from critical failure but it completely misses the point of you OS might fail due to a bad hard drive, I only hope this is addressed in the future. I may or may not create an image of my OS to restore on this drive.
I would fully recommend using < http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/products/migrateeasy/) "> Acronis Migrate Easy 7.0 if you are planning to migrate to a new hard drive, they also make a program for imaging your OS as well.

If you have similar issues and need a quick solution Migrate Easy 7.0 is the easiest way to solve your problems.